Monthly Archives: March 2013

Several years ago, I acquired an Epiphone Genesis electric guitar. It was free, but needed repair. The neck had snapped, but the amazing people at Specimen Products did an even more amazing job restoring it for far less than what that guitar was worth. So I figured it was a sign that I need to learn to play. (Now the cats knocking over my guitar stand and snapping the neck a second time, that might have been a sign too….)

Being an electronics geek, and having an interest in retro technology, of course the only way to go would be a tube amp. And a friend moving out of town conveniently had a tube amp kit she built, but it didn’t work. She’d part with it for the sum of $20. Sold! The chassis was clearly homemade, but I figured that if I could get it to work, I could always rebuild the amp on a new chassis at a later date. And Pumping Station: One recently acquired a finger brake for bending sheet metal, which will be ideal.

First, about the circuit design. Most normal single-ended amps work by having a power transformer that takes 120V on the primary winding, and at least two secondary windings. One provides a low AC voltage to powers the tube heater filaments. The other steps the voltage up so it can be rectified into DC, which becomes the B+ voltage that the tubes use to amplify signals.

Well, I can honestly say that last weekend I got well and truly hammered.

Pun intended. The very talented Adrianna McKinley taught a blacksmithing class at Pumping Station: One last weekend. The topic: making fire pokers. I’d played with blacksmithing many years ago at a Boy Scout camp, but never done anything with it since. Well, Pumping Station: One has a forge, and this class was also certification for it, so based on my life philosophy of “whoever dies with the most hobbies wins”, I signed up. My partner Elizabeth did as well.

One of the more noble uses of electronics: enabling the production of beer. Chillmon is a concept originally created by Eric Stein to use a Raspberry Pi to control the fermentation temperature of beer at Pumping Station:One. It began life as a breadboard that used TMP36 sensors to record the temperature in the cabinet where we ferment, with Python code that graphed the output on a web page and responded to IRC queries with the beer temperature.